Former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani (AP Photo/Seth Wenig), Wandrea “Shaye” Moss (center) and (right) her mother Ruby Freeman (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
Rudy Giuliani on Friday asked a federal bankruptcy judge in New York to modify an automatic stay and permit him to challenge the $148 defamation judgment a jury unanimously slapped him with in Washington, D.C., back in December for defaming Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers Giuliani wrongly accused of helping to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump.
The seven-page filing from Giuliani attorney Gary Fischoff asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean H. Lane to lift an automatic stay “for the limited purposes of allowing the Freeman case to proceed to the extent of Giuliani filing such post judgment motions to modify the judgment and/or for a new trial” and, “if it is deemed necessary,” to file a “notice or notices of appeal in that proceeding.”
“To be clear, the stay modification would be for the post verdict motions and appeals. It would not be to authorize the Plaintiffs to take any steps to perfect any additional liens or otherwise proceed with further collection of the judgment except to participate in the post-judgment litigation,” the filing said.
Calling the $148,000,000 defamation judgment the “immediate precipitating cause” of the former New York City mayor’s filing for bankruptcy under Chapter 11, Giuliani “believes” the judgment is “outsized,” “unreasonable on its face,” and is, perhaps, completely unwarranted.
“The Debtor believes the outsized judgment is unreasonable on its face and does not reflect the true damages, if any, suffered by Plaintiffs,” the filing said. “The Debtor expects to be successful in having the judgment modified or vacated. As such a substantial reduction in the Freeman claim would render a substantial benefit to the Debtor, his estate and his creditors.”
“Accordingly it is extremely important the Debtor be authorized to continue with the post judgment process,” the documents added.
During testimony before the Jan. 6 Committee in July 2022, Shaye Moss said that nonexistent “USB drives” full of votes, which Giuliani accused her and her mother of passing around “as if they were vials of heroin or cocaine,” was simply “a ginger mint.” Nonetheless, the mother and daughter poll workers were subjected to a barrage of vile threats from those who believed that they were stealing votes at State Farm Arena in November 2020.
Giuliani lost the defamation case by default in August as a sanction for his “willful shirking of his discovery obligations,” meaning the only issue that was left for the jury to decide was how much he had to pay.
At trial, Ruby Freeman testified that as a result of Giuliani’s falsehoods she was inundated with “hundreds and hundreds” of threatening and harassing calls, texts, emails and letters.
“They were going to come cut me up,” Freeman testified.
Moss testified she was “afraid for my life” and that she “literally felt like someone going to come and attempt to hang me and there’s nothing that anyone will be able to do about it.”
Giuliani declined to testify in court, but outside of court — both during the trial and after — he repeated claims that Freeman and Moss were “engaging in changing votes.”
After the jury award, Freeman and Moss sued Giuliani again, but this time seeking a “targeted injunction barring Defendant Giuliani from continuing to repeat the very falsehoods about Plaintiffs that have already been found and held, conclusively, to be defamatory.”
In another Friday bankruptcy filing seeking an expedited hearing, Giuliani attorney Gary Fischoff explained that the “sooner the Freeman judgment can be addressed, the sooner the Debtor will be in a position to file a proposed Plan of Reorganization.”
Notably, the court docket in the bankruptcy case shows that over the last couple of days lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems, Hunter Biden, and Noelle Dunphy, Giuliani’s former director of business development who accused him of sexual assault in May.
In another setback for Giuliani, his Georgia RICO trial judge on Friday refused to give him an “indefinite extension” of a Jan. 8 motions deadline to review “voluminous discovery.”
“Defendant does not articulate exactly what discovery must still be reviewed, or why the review has not been completed in the approximately four months that have passed since arraignment,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee observed. “While Defendant claims to have filed ‘many’ motions concerning discovery, none appear on the docket. Extensions are only considered upon filing of a particularized motion containing a detailed, fact-based explanation of the need for the extension including the amount of time needed.”
“The motion is DENIED,” the judge wrote. “All deadlines remain in place.”
Law&Crime reached out to a Giuliani representative for comment on the bankruptcy filing.
Read the filing here.
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